There is a kind of company that no amount of love from someone who came later can provide — the company of a shared origin, of another person whose bones were made in the same house — and I had cut myself off from the only source of it I would ever have.

Sitting on the floor with the photographs between us, passing our childhood back and forth in silence, I felt the specific loneliness of the last nine years finally close over and heal, not because anything was said, but because for the first time in a decade I was in the presence of the one person who did not need me to explain where I came from, because he came from there too.

Fran came over on the last of those days and identified people in the old photos we’d never known — a great-aunt, a neighbor from before our time, our mother as a bride laughing at something outside the frame — and it struck me that this, too, was almost gone: the last people who could look at a photograph and say a name.

Terry and I were becoming those people now.